


even if nobody else sings along

by York



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Epilogue, Pynch Week, Ronan-centric, during the Opal short story, the hallway scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 09:47:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15434349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/York/pseuds/York
Summary: Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time."Do you want to listen to it?" Adam asks.





	even if nobody else sings along

**Author's Note:**

> filling the Pynch Week 2018, Day 4 prompt for Death, but in the reflective kind of way. in the short story, Opal runs away before we can learn why Ronan is standing there in the hallway, so i thought that scene could use another set of eyes.
> 
> you can find me on [tumblr](http://ellipsesetcetera.tumblr.com/)

Moments like these have white noise and they have melodies.

There's the huff of Ronan's breath against the skin of Adam's neck — there's the shuffle of Adam's cheek against the shortness of Ronan's hair — there's the beating of Ronan's heart, animal in a cage, snarling at its bars, searching for a way out. His ribs rattle with its insistence.

That's the noise. Kinetic bassline, background and physical, clumsily situating itself into sensations and amplifying them, stealing Ronan out of his head and reminding him of being in his home, in this hallway, outside of his parents' old room even though he has never felt further away from them. It is silence, unemptied.

And then there is the rest of the tune.

Heard in the way Adam has taken the cassette from his hand, replacing Ronan's grip with stitchwork fingers, the wordless way he fills the second-floor space so that it overflows into the rooms and down the stairs. It does battle with the haunting tritone coming from inside the master bedroom, from a broken instrument, dissonant only because Ronan is trying not to listen to it. If only it could be muted, and there was just the white noise left, calming like rain —

Ronan wishes he could press pause on that part of the track, instead focus on how Adam sweeps his thumb over Ronan's knuckles. How he can't help shifting his feet to lean heavily on Adam, how Adam leans back into him.

They're startled by a noise, a real noise, an actual clattering of boxes and bannisters behind them, a diminuendo galloping downstairs. Ronan picks up his head from Adam's neck; Adam sighs. The screen door stutters a coda in the following seconds.

"Opal," Adam says, quietly, his voice wavering glass about to shatter. The realization that she must have been watching unsettles the both of them.

Ronan inhales through his nose, long and composing, wipes his forearm across his cheek, exhales and sniffs again. He doesn't let go of Adam, and Adam doesn't let go of him.

He's so fucking grateful Adam is here. Without him, Ronan might have fallen apart in the hallway, or gone into his parents' room and torn it up, just to match his insides. He might have found his tape deck to play the cassette and blasted it to the onslaught. He might have treated it like street racing; numbing, fast, destructive. He would have... he doesn't know. He doesn't know what he's capable of, but with Adam, he's always a little closer to knowing.

The evisceration he felt in the lonesome minutes is fading, so he reaches for Adam's other hand, the one that's holding the cassette, and lifts it, palm up. Doesn't take it back, just lets it hang between them. The faded scrawl of _VOWS_ stares up at them, resembling Ronan's own handwriting, but in the more assured slant of his father's style.

"Dad —" Ronan stops. "My father made it for my mother when they renewed their vows. Of their favorite songs." He watches how Adam's long fingers skirt around the edge of it, thumbnail grazing the gears in the center. "I didn't realize I still had it in my room. He let me borrow it, just before he —" and a chill in his spine collapses the sentence. Under a toppled picture frame, lost to time, Ronan had found the tape, and he almost wishes he hadn't.

Adam's eyes on him are resolute, undusting, and Ronan feels a burst of disarming love that makes him go on, "Jesus, I don't even know if they were married in the first place. If it wasn't even a fucking renewal, and it was the first time in real life. Can you fucking imagine? That would make me a bastard, wouldn't it?"

It does more damage than he expects — Adam waits, lets him finish, lets the misplaced hate and sawdust in Ronan's teeth grind into nothing, ravaging his windpipe and his insides, and maybe that's what he wants from this. To feel as beaten or torn to pieces as them.

Niall Lynch never told his sons the truth about their mother. He was a practiced secret-keeper, shielding them from those kinds of questions. Ronan has so many questions that will never be answered — _would you be proud of me Dad would you have still loved me, do you forgive me Mom do you blame me_ — and they're _quiet_ , like furious last-words whispers.

Still, Adam waits, until the words are finished making a mess of the past and then stop echoing, and the hallway has just them in it.

Patience steadies Adam's palm as he turns it over, placing the cassette back into Ronan's hand. He presses it into skin, and Ronan takes it.

"Do you want to listen to it?" Adam asks.

In his room, they step over sharded glass and a splintered picture frame — swept to the ground after finding the tape — receipts, laundry, instruments and books, strewn during his rifling disguised as _spring cleaning_. Ronan fetches his tape deck from his desk. Adam sits on the bed. Ronan sprawls next to him, flat on his back with the monstrosity of the shitty, old-timey cassette player propped on his stomach. It's the one he used to record Adam's _a shitbox singalong_ , the one Ronan gifted him, thinking himself some romantic shithead for doing the same wooing as his dad. After a moment, Adam lies down next to him, arms folded over his middle.

Instead of playing the tape, Ronan lets it burn in his hand, fiddling. Then sets it and the deck aside.

When he looks over, Adam is already looking back.

He thinks back to when he first kissed Adam. Here. Courage worked, hands freed, placing the toy model car next to him and turning back to find Adam looking at him, or at his mouth, or maybe it was just Ronan looking at Adam's mouth, or both, crossroads before him and he could have just stood up. He could have not done it. But with Adam, he felt capable of more.

He'd kiss Adam now, but kissing only solves so many problems. Only says so many unsaid things. It can say _I'm sorry_ , or _I'm here_ , or _I'd fucking pull all the stars down from the sky if it would make you happy_.

It always has trouble saying _I'm hurting_.

The absence of kissing sometimes can say that, and hand-holding can say that, so Ronan does both, reaching out, lifting up, watching the way Adam's wrist bends lightly at his touch.

Adam's blinking grows longer, heavier, and Ronan thinks he may drift off but they are the untired kinds of blinks, the ones that are like shutters of a camera, committing something to memory. Rhythmically, he traces the lines of Adam's hand, across and back. His hands are softer these days, touchable fingers still long and bony and eager to press behind Ronan's ears, or against his ribs, or lower than that. It's distracting to know that he's never loved anything quite like he loves Adam. Adam once confessed that nothing terrified him quite like loving Ronan did, because he was sure he loved too much.

"Or we don't have to listen to it," Adam says.

"I was going to."

"Is that what you were out there deciding?"

Ronan says again, "I was going to. I was just figuring out how." He looks away, finally, up at the ceiling. "Or if they would even want me to listen to it again."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"It's _theirs_."

Adam thinks on that. "You drive your dad's car," he says. "You let me drive it."

Ronan holds up the cassette; its plastic insides are frantic as he shakes it. "This was _theirs_. This was _Mom's_. The stuff between them belongs to _them_." A will written by his father can't simply change all that with one penstroke. "It's like —" he waves around the room, to the pillaged state of it, in-between unearthing and cleanliness. "It's all this shit I'm throwing out or putting away. Fixing up the house. It's just my stuff." He can feel a change, and it's Adam tracing the lines of Ronan's hand instead of the other way around. "But I can't even fucking think about touching their room or anything in it."

He could shift his frustration into anger, easily, from neutral to reverse. Anger is an easy thing to deal with — sadness is a standstill. Anger has action, provocation, a path to resolution, but this is just a lot of facts. Facts that can't be changed.

The real reason the bedroom remains untouchable is the sum of so many things. Day after day in the Barns, and on each of those days it's a different reason than the day before. It makes it impossible to explain.

It's more than not wanting to disturb their ghosts, more than not wanting to tread on a place so sacrosanct. Voices, each of them trying to be an answer, talk over each other until no words can be made out.

Some days, it is the coalescing laughter of Ronan's parents from down the hall when they were repainting their room. Or it is their hands, tugging winter hats over Ronan's eyes and wool scarves tighter around his collar on the first day of snowfall. Or it is the sugar-sweet breakfast batter wafting through the house on Saturday mornings. It's his parents — his dad, a loss he'd never be used to, and his mom, a loss he'd hoped wouldn't come so soon — and their love and the shapes of their faces, losing focus over time, only clear now in photographs.

Some days, it's his brothers, too. What they were and how they made believe under blanket forts and told stories and played instruments, poorly, and fought and made up. Gansey mixes in with these scenes, late but belonging, his edges smooth and fitting into the Lynch family's gaps.

There are anniversaries of things, and birthdays of things, and holidays and special marks on old calendars in old boxes like _zoo trip_ and _show and tell_ and _New York cabin_ that span across several squares.

Those are the days that embody collections of experiences. Pinpointed times that echo when they pass by every year.

Worse still are the ones not tied to any particular day.

Worse are the things like the creaky third step of the staircase, where his mother would catch him when he was wearing muddy boots and spin him around, and he would laugh until his stomach hurt. Or the barn doors, the ones he'd fling open after finishing his morning chores and his father would be pulling into the driveway after a month-long trip. 

Earlier that day, Ronan had found a moth-eaten blanket in the linen closet, the one that he and Declan used to share on the couch down in the living room, rapt with attention while Niall animatedly told stories and Aurora watched from her reading chair, face aglow and just as entranced.

There are so many of those things that they feel like permanent residents in his heart.

He can't just _move them_.

He holds Adam's hand. He feels the weight of the air, locked into place. A hoarder, suffocating.

"They're dead," he says, "and that's all there is left. And my mom —" Ronan pinches his eyes shut, releases them. "I don't — I can't touch their stuff."

Adam rolls on his side. "Ronan. That was all just months ago. You don't have to be okay with it yet."

" _When_ will it be okay?"

No one has a right to that answer, and so Adam can't give one.

"Come on," is all Adam can say. He nods to the tape deck lying on Ronan's other side.

Ronan clenches his jaw. Adam taps their intertwined hands on the side of Ronan's thigh, and Ronan sighs, and puts the tape in, and plays it.

It's The Mamas & the Papas, and Ronan's chest flattens.

He hasn't played this tape in years, hasn't heard this song in years, has forgotten what was on it. The first half-minute of Make Your Own Kind of Music spirals him back into a boy of barely fifteen, listening to his father instruct him, _take care of this, will you_ , and Ronan promising him, _promising_ that he would —

In the present, Adam has started singing.

Ronan cycles through several bunched-together extremes. Shock, then frustrating attraction, then splits a smile. "Parrish. God. How do you know this?"

Adam half-shrugs against the bedspread during a lull. "The garage always puts country or classic rock on the radio, and the dial gets stuck."

He sings. Badly. More talking than musical. It builds Ronan the fuck up. Adam sits up straight, legs hanging over the side, messing up the lyrics, pitchy and beautiful and lacking any rhythm whatsoever and breathtaking.

The song trails, the kind of fade that kicks the chorus again and again into a horizon that has no definitive end — Ronan hits eject in the space it leaves behind, filled by them both still laughing, sits up, and then he does kiss Adam, because he is ready to confess something other than hurt.

They're sitting on the edge of the bed, softly touching lips. Ronan's eyes burn, closed, and his ribs are charred, cracked, and his throat is dry. But Adam's mouth is smooth. A little cool. His shoulder presses to Adam's shoulder and they kiss again, no urgency.

Laughter stopped, expressions loose and hanging open, they lean apart. Adam looks at him, or his mouth, but mostly _him_ , a careful study.

"You're allowed to do things to remember them," Adam says, a leaf falling to the ground. "It won't mess up the memory to do things on top of them. They're still there."

Things like playing music they loved and then kissing his boyfriend. Like being in his childhood bedroom where his mother would read him stories and then feeding a raven he pulled out of his dreams. Like cooking meals for two in the kitchen where his father's weekender bag would be dropped, fanfare on tile, home from a trip, where his father would open his arms and Ronan would fly into them.

Memories, bleeding, memories, crossing over, just like people, at risk of fading or being replaced or erased or forgotten. Does a memory die, Ronan wonders, when left unstoked, or does it die when festered on so long, dragged into so many tangential thoughts, that it becomes corrupted by context?

How should he preserve the dead? How should he remember his parents when they're gone?

With living, is a start.

Maybe those bygone moments will be as decrepit as a cassette, melody faded in the foreground and static in the background and acoustics changing depending on where they're remembered, what Ronan's mind looks like when they're brought into the light again — but when they're spoken out loud, they're _loud_ , as full of life as his family was, is, will be.

Legacies don't need to be perfectly preserved, he thinks. They just need to be heard.

Ronan shuts the tape deck. Presses play.


End file.
